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Labor Market Spotlight: Legacy

April 25, 2017 - 9:22am
Dave Moore

Beyond the Shops at Legacy and behind the shining new Ford Center at The Star in Frisco, tech firms and companies not traditionally perceived as tech are snapping up software and computer system developers left and right.

Capital One and Toyota North America — primarily concerned with banking and car-manufacturing, respectively — are among dozens of employers in the Frisco/Plano Legacy area that have adopted the concept that all 21st century companies are tech companies, and they are hiring accordingly. Our analysis shows that businesses in this area represent a wide cross section of the U.S. economy — retail, health care, and finance — all of which benefit from the skills of digital workers. And compared with other employment centers in the Dallas region, people who work in the Legacy area tend to live close by. Nearly half of the workers (roughly 42 percent) employed in the Frisco/Plano Legacy area commute less than 10 miles to their jobs.

Thousands of software developers, coders, and systems analysts are already on-campus in Legacy area businesses, integrating and analyzing company data and market intelligence to improve efficiency, profit margins, and meet customer expectations. Labor analysts predict that jobs like these will grow at an average annual rate of about 4 percent over the next 10 years, more than a percentage point higher than the average job growth rate over all. Those jobs average more than $100,000 in wages a year, nearly double the average pay for all jobs in that area. While not all of these professionals are building the next Facebook, they’re essential in helping these companies build and keep an edge in the marketplace. As Wired Magazine writes, “For decades, pop culture … has promoted the ‘lone genius’ coder. We’ve cooed over the billionaire programmers of The Social Network and the Anonymized, emo, leather-clad hackers of Mr. Robot. But the real heroes are people who go to work every day and turn out good stuff — whether it’s cars, coal, or code.”